Battery temperature can slow down Pixel 2's rapid charge

What's going on with the Pixel 2? Proud owners of Google's flagship, and its big brother, the Pixel 2 XL, have been reporting issues with battery life and charging. As investigations continue, all signs point to temperature as the culprit. It looks like some models will need to warm up before they get really going.

Pixel 2 battery charging slowly? Your phone might be feeling cold

It looks like Google are having their feet held to the fire after the users reported that, following the February security patch that activated the Pixel Visual Core, its Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL handsets were overheating and battery life suffering as a consequence. But for some users, their phones might not be hot enough! This is because many are suffering from slowed-down charging when the battery is below a certain temperature.

Users affected by this problem report that the phone charges very slowly even when the “Charging rapidly” notification is displayed. The issue has been raised in Google’s official product forums and following tests from several users, a culprit has emerged—the charging amperage changed according to the temperature.

One user closely observed his handset and noted that when the temperature of the phone was below 20ºC, it would charge at about 750mA. But if the temperature was raised by a few degrees, the amperage also picks up—in this case, to a much higher 3 A.

What can I do to fix this?

Google has claimed that the issue is currently under investigation, but there's no fix yet. In the meantime, if your unit has been affected, the best option seems to be to warm up your phone yourself to encourage it to get those juices flowing. You can just warm the phone with your hands or run some intensive applications like high-graphics games or AR/VR applications to heat up the device before charging.

Has your Pixel 2 suffered from this problem? What are you doing to work around it?

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